Religious Suicide

My cousin committed suicide two weeks ago, on the ninth of August, because she thought Heavenly Father wanted her to. Her decent into mental illness was slow and subtle, like a frog in a boiling pot. No one understood how bad it really was, and therefore no one took drastic enough preventative measures to stop the tragedy. This is her story.

She grew up in the most beautiful Mormon family, the oldest of six. She was about ten years older than me, so we were never close, but I played with her younger siblings my entire childhood. I think we all looked up to her as some distant object of perfection. She was a living snow white--She had perfect white skin, and gorgeous, long dark hair. She sewed her own clothes, cooked for everyone, and knew how to can anything. She had no qualms about scolding or telling you how to behave--A born mother.

And that's exactly what she became. After her mission to the Philippines, (a difficult and disturbing mission. She was in the last group of sister missionaries ever allowed to serve there. I have wondered if the disturbing things she saw somehow contributed to her illness,) she married the first man she ever dated and became a mother. The man she married painted for a living, and didn't provide her with the bounteous, lovely lifestyle she was used to. He moved her to a dump of a place, far away from her family. The pressure of being a poor, new mother without support sent her into a post-partum depression that never seemed to lift. And every time she added another child the pressure built, the depression thickened, and people started noticing she was not acting normally.

"The men in my ward are all flirting with me." She said. That's how it started. She would tell elaborate stories of how this elder and that elder couldn't stand her beauty and were always implying that they wanted her. I remember laughing behind her back, thinking that she wanted male attention so desperately that she was just inventing flirtation that wasn't there. I told my family, "She should have dated more men before she got married. She never got to experience the fun of flirtation, and so she needs it now." But pretty soon the stories of flirtation turned into more unbelievable tales about the bishopric, how they wanted to have affairs with her, how they desperately wanted to put their seed in her, especially when she was pregnant. She started telling everyone that the bishop had set up surveillance in their home. Everyone told her that she was mistaken, that they were worried her grip on reality was failing. She responded with an ultimatum-- The bishopric was planning something awful, and it was going to happen in six weeks. If it didn't happen then she would admit she was crazy.

It didn't happen. She got up in sacrament meeting and began reciting her list of “The Top Ten Reasons Why I'm Crazy.” She started telling everyone the things she believed about the bishop, and other completely inappropriate things, but she didn't get very far because her husband walked up to the pulpit, took her out of the building, and immediately drove her to the mental hospital.

She didn't stay there very long. Her parents drove down to see her in the hospital and she seemed to be completely normal. “She's fine.” They assured everyone. “She just needs to take it easy.” They brought her to live with them so they could help with the kids and ease the pressure she was under. It helped. She seemed to be doing better. But when she moved back home the descent started again. She named all of the rooms in their home a room in the temple. Their bedroom was the celestial room. The closets were the temple dressing rooms, and they were only allowed to get undressed in the “dressing rooms.” She spent every night obsessively reading the Book of Mormon. Her sister found her scriptures once, flipped through them and saw the word “hotdog” written on every page. “Why did you write hotdog all over your scriptures?” She asked. My cousin replied, “Well, clearly I couldn't have written penis on them.” Like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Every time she read a verse that reminded her of a penis, she marked it with “hotdog.”

And then came the day that she stumbled across Matthew 5:30, “And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” It struck her to the core. It resounded within her, as if God were answering a prayer, as if God had shown her the way to atone for her guilt. She told her husband that God wanted her to atone for her sins. She knew it. She could feel it. My brother, who used to cut his wrists every time he masturbated in order to punish himself and knows well the amount of guilt even a sane member of the church can experience, suggested that perhaps it was masturbation that she thought she needed to atone for. She felt that her arm was evil, that it was causing her to sin, and that she needed to get rid of it.

Her husband found her in the kitchen late one night, rifling through the drawers.

“Honey,” He asked apprehensively, “What are you looking for?”

She sighed. “I know you're not going to understand this, but I need to cut off my arm.”

“No.” He said. “If you do that, you'll die, do you understand?”

But she didn't. If you ever tried to talk reason to her she would grin and nod her head, like she was on a higher plane than you, so you couldn't possibly understand as well as her. She believed that if she only accomplished this Abrahamic test, God would preserve her. Her husband found websites about successfully amputating a limb in her recent searches. He hid all the knives and arranged for her to stay once again with her parents, because he had to go to work and could not keep an eye on her all the time. He drove her up to Utah, and on the way they stopped by a temple. He got out of the car, and she got in the driver's seat and drove off with their three children, leaving him stranded at the temple. She drove so fast that she got in a car chase with the police, all the while holding the Book of Mormon in front of her, believing it would protect her. The cops couldn't catch her. They threw down spikes on the freeway, but she dodged them, and finally OnStar actually turned off her car, and the cops sent her to jail. She was charged with child endangerment, but the charges were dropped, her parents successfully brought her back to their home, and everyone was so grateful that they had dodged a bullet, and that it was all over. Things were looking up.

Before she entered the house, her sister hid all of the knives. The whole family spent the evening with her, and watched as she sprawled out her patriarchal blessing, church talks, and her scriptures all over the floor, and obsessively marked them. Her sister asked her, “What happened to you? What caused all of this? What is it that made you like this?” My cousin started weeping and said, “There's just so much pressure to be perfect.”

She slept in her little sister's upstairs room with her three children that night. But she didn't sleep. As soon as everyone was quiet, she slipped out of her room and found a garden saw in the garage, and a pair of sewing scissors in the sewing room. She laid out her temple dress, and pinned a note to it, telling her little sister that she would wear this dress when she became a bride of Christ. She went to the downstairs bathroom and cut off all of her long dark hair in front of the mirror. She sat in the sewing room in her garments and tried to cut off her arm, but didn't make it all the way through. She tried to make it up the stairs to, what, get help? To put on her temple dress because she had a vision of the way she wanted to be found? She didn't make it up the stairs. Her father found her in the morning, and now our entire family is plagued with nightmares. I can hardly stand to listen in church, because the religious phrases frighten me. My relationship to the church was already complicated, but now it's impossibly difficult because while it was religion that contributed to her path of destruction, it was religion that I needed for comfort in the aftermath. And yet I couldn't find comfort in the doctrine that led to her death, or even the sweet religious phrases that people say. They just sound frightening and demonic to me now.

Have any of you had any experience with mental illness? Has anyone else seen religion play a heavy part in it? I would like to discuss the possibility that religious ideas can be damaging to the mind. How do you sift through the good ones and the creepy ones? How can I feel comfortable teaching my children ideas that I fear will warp their minds?